MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL THEATER REVIEWS

Baseball's Sad Lexicon rings with the names of some of the Chicago Cubs' greatest players, and Tinker to Evers to Chance rings with great performances all around. There's a line in the poem that goes 'Making a Giant hit into a double'. Well, Artisity has taken a giant hit of a play and turned it out...

As a first time audience member at Bryant Lake Bowl and Theater, I didn't know what to expect as I walked into the building and didn't see a theater. As I finally found and walked into the theater, I was greeted by a pianist telling jokes and playing a merry tune, I didn't know what to expect. As I ...

Might children appear to be called maggots or miracles? What type of question could that possibly be? The famous British young adult author, Roald Dahl, fills his pages with chill and thrill inducing scenes that empower children to take themselves seriously and asks that very question of his readers...

Opening on the past Saturday night at the Ordway Center, MN Opera staged a magnificent production of Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 Opera La Traviata. Verdi's breathtaking love and death opera accompanied by Francesco Maria Piave's libretto was adapted after Alexander Dumas' 'Lady of the Camellias' or 'La Da...

This month is all about gender when it comes to the theatre I've seen. The first was Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Theater Latte Da which really flips gender upside down. The second now is a beautiful production of VictorVictoria at Artistry in Bloomington. VictorVictoria is a truly unique story tha...

Playwriting can be a form of thinking, and plays can be thought-experiments. That's true of Jordan Harrison's four actor, 80 minute play MARJORIE PRIME (a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize), set in 2062 and beyond. He's investigating whether advances in artificial intelligence might enable new ...

'Bodies' is the first word spoken in Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and it's the physicality of the story telling that makes this show such a theatrical pleasure. First developed with students at Northwestern, the production went pro and opened on Broadway in 2002 at Circle in...

When I saw Hello, Dolly! In New York with Bette Midler last year, I was in awe. I knew that it was special, and it was an experience I'd never forget. I truly considered myself one of the luckiest theatre goers after seeing Midler in this iconic role and now I consider myself even luckier with the n...

What is described to some as crude humor to others is the best kind of humor. I was delighted to see that the touring production of Monty Python's Spamalot was touring and would be making a stop in St. Paul at the Ordway. Adapted from the 1975 film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this production m...

While I love all forms of theater, it's apparent that typically I gravitate towards musicals more than plays. However there is one theatre in town that still somehow manages to pull me in with every play they produce and that is the Jungle Theater. Whether it's thrilling, drama or a comedy I always ...

Sometimes all the pieces come together: story, language, visuals, performance, staging.  That's the case with the superb production of the French classic CYRANO DE BERGERAC currently playing on the proscenium stage at the Guthrie.  Artistic director Joseph Haj first created his own adaptation in 2...

Do you find it hard to imagine how to engage, directly but civilly, with people who hold views you emphatically oppose? If so, make a beeline for History Theater in Saint Paul to see SISTERS OF PEACE. This new play models that very thing several times, even within a nuclear family....

Was Eva Peron a saint or sinner, or perhaps merely an incredibly determined woman who changed the face of Argentinian politics? In an elegant stage presentation of the award winning Evita, Lyric Arts on the Main Street Stage delivered a theatrical jewel to their audiences this past weekend. Andrew L...

Accept an invitation to a grand adventure when Children's Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis produces a condensed, world premiere version of J.R.R, Tolkien's "The Hobbit." The popular novel, which happens to be a best selling children's book of all time, has remained in print since being published...

On a middle of the month March weekend, Children's Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis on the United Health Group Stage, offered their audiences a Middle Earth journey when they presented the World Premiere The Hobbit.  Based on one of J.R.R. Tolkien's bestselling novels, the British actor, direc...

This past weekend at the Ordway Center, MN Opera unveiled their World Premiere The Fix in tribute to the All-American sport and spirt of baseball. The story created through the company's New Works Initiative by Eric Simonson, who wrote the libretto and also directed the production, was accompanied b...

It could not be a better time for the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres to be opening their run of ABBA's famous jukebox musical, Mamma Mia. Just as the sun is finally starting to peek out from this awful winter we've had, many of us got transported to a beautiful island in Greece with some incredible song...

It was a week full of candy and sweets for me personally. First my work life was full of a sugar high with the grand opening of Candytopia at Mall of America - shameless plug but it's incredible so you should go check it out - and then it was the opening night of a new musical. The adaptation of Roa...

INTO THE WOODS is new artistic director Marcela Lorca's debut directorial outing for Ten Thousand Things after the retirement of renowned artist and social change agent Michelle Hensley, the founder of the company. Seeing this Sondheim masterpiece up close and stripped of pretentiousness is a treat....

Anoka's Lyric Arts in the Main Stage Theater reprises a 200 year old tradition when the company stages Jane Austen's famous bestselling novel Sense & Sensibility--For the company's recent production, which opened on a February weekend, Director Natalie Novacek choose an adaptation by actor/playwrig...

Ifa Bayeza's (lower case titled) benevolence, the second play in her trilogy revolving around Emmett Till, the 14 year old Chicago boy brutally murdered in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, is hard to watch. It's also important, because it takes us beyond what we think we know to detail the aftermath o...

When I hear the word "magic" I automatically think of two things. There is the magic of theatre and of course one of my favorite stories from when I was a little kid and that is the magical world of Harry Potter. Audiences in the Twin Cities can now be treated to two of my favorite magical things......

Deep into the Minneapolis midwinter ice and snow, book a ticket for the Guthrie's As You Like It on the Wurtele Thrust Stage and travel to the forest. William Shakespeare's tribute to the delights and folly of love. Set in the Forest of Ardenne, the evening promises a brief respite to city life in...

Briskly written and dynamically staged, this world premiere tells a complicated, true, little known story with wit and economy. From the early days of commercial airlines, stewardesses were hired based on looks, required to pass weekly weight checks, forbidden to wear glasses or marry, and fired au...

Riding a bicycle into the  theater, similar to a charming pied piper, Autumn Ness, rings a bell to call the tiny tot audience into the Gargill Studio at Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. In CTC'S production,The Biggest Little House in the Forest, a play adapted from the picture book b...